The Impossibles - Delphis/ Be My Baby

 

Psychedelic 90s dancefloor action from lost Edinburgh duo

Label: Fontana

Year of Release: 1991

This isn't the first time we've looked at The Impossibles on "Left and to the Back" - we also pondered their marvellous cover of Slapp Happy's "The Drum" back in 2018. Since that time, however, they've remained a frustratingly elusive pair with no new information about them appearing online at all.

This is an unusual situation. Whenever I write about sixties or seventies bands who never had an LP out, I usually hit a brick wall when trying to uncover the band's future movements; this is only to be expected as their online presence is normally weak. It's deeply strange for a nineties act to be so shy when they realise they have a lot of Internet admirers, though. They're normally among the first to rush forward to reintroduce themselves and talk about a reunion gig they're holding at the Betsy Trotwood in London in 2022. 

Lucy Dallas and Mags Grundy of the Impossibles are obviously exceptions to that general rule, but perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Even at the time, the small number of press interviews I saw revealed two individuals who were modest and self-effacing, suggesting that they'd only managed to get a major label deal due to connections and a lot of luck. Their sound may have had a Madchester tinge to it, but they certainly weren't taking any of their promotional cues from the Stone Roses. 

That doesn't mean to say that the three singles they put out aren't lost jewels of that era, though, in particular this effort and the final 45 "The Drum". While "The Drum" was an infectious thumping party anthem, "Delphis" is closer to the blissed out psychedelic indie-dance doing the rounds in the early nineties while also partly pointing towards the approaching shoegazing wave. The keyboard and bass lines chop and bounce along as if culled from a lost Happy Mondays demo, but the vocals trill, coo and wail incomprehensibly, creating a single that sounds simultaneously welcoming and introspective. It's one of the few efforts of the era you could comfortably push towards fans of either Slowdive or Northside, and acts as a curious marker of the changing times (it's possibly no coincidence that the B-side of an earlier Impossibles 45 "Privilege" was produced by Kevin Shields).

The Impossibles - The Drum/ Our Love Is God

Fantastic baggy(ish) cover of the 1974 Slapp Happy tune (clumsy typo on the label though, Fontana).

Label: Fontana 

Year of Release: 1991

There were numerous cultural parallels between the late sixties and the 1989-91 period, which barely need emphasising - the "Second Summer Of Love" tag felt slightly like a lazy media invention to enable Mums and Dads to get a better grip on what was going on (and Danny Wilson to release snarky records on the topic) but nonetheless was more accurate than usual. Besides that, plenty of acts during the period were not ashamed to cover some of the hairier moments of rock's past. 

It didn't always pay off, though, as evidenced here. This cover of Slapp Happy's "The Drum" fell into complete obscurity at the time. I used to see copies of it in the reduced box at my local record store, and was intrigued by the fact that the long-haired woman pictured on the sleeve looked uncannily like someone who used to attend my local indie nightclub week in, week out. Was it her band?

Apparently not. It transpired that The Impossibles were actually from Edinburgh, and revolved around the nucleus of the duo Lucy Dallas and Mags Grundy. In one of their very few press interviews, they self-deprecatingly suggested that the only reason they managed to get signed to Fontana was because they were fanzine editors who had built up an enormous array of music industry contacts as a result. It seems as though they were being needlessly modest - their debut single was a likeable piece of jangly indie-pop produced by Kevin Shields, but the second release "Delphis" went one better, being a scintillating piece of ambient yet funky electro-psychdelia which glided gracefully through the clouds of the cold, dark winter of 1991, noticed only by the most eagle-eyed of spotters.